The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (10 page)

Mrs. Johnson zipped the passports back into place and went out into the corridor, down the steps and into the sun.
“Domani,”
the priest said after them.

Holding Clara by the hand, she made her way back to the hotel.

The instant she was alone she had the passports out, searching through them. Would nothing give her a clue to what had struck Signor Naccarelli? She remembered stories: the purloined letter; the perfect crime, marred only by the murderer’s driver’s license left carelessly
on the hotel dresser. What had she missed? She thought her nerves would fly apart in all directions.

Slowly, with poise and majesty, the beautiful afternoon went by. A black cloud crossed the city, flashed two or three fierce bolts, rumbled halfheartedly and passed on. The river glinted under the sun, and the boys and fishermen who had not been frightened inside shouted and laughed at the ones who had. Everything stood strongly exposed in sunlight and cast its appropriate shadow: in Italy there is the sense that everything is clear and visible, that nothing is with-held. Fabrizio, when Margaret Johnson had touched his arm to detain him in the office of the
parroco
, had drawn back like recoiling steel. When Clara had started forward with a cry, he had set her quickly back, and silent. If they were to be rejected, had they not at least the right to common courtesy? What were they being given to understand? In Florence, at four o’clock, everything seemed to take a step nearer, more distinctly, more totally to be seen.

When the cloud came up, Mrs. Johnson and Clara clung together, pretending that was what they were afraid of. Later they got out one of Clara’s favorite books: Nancy Drew, the lady detective, turned airline hostess to solve the murder of a famous explorer. Nancy Drew had so far been neglected. Clara was good and did as she was told about everything, but could not eat. Late in the evening, around ten, the telephone rang in their suite. A gentleman was waiting below for the signora.

Coming down alone, Mrs. Johnson found Signor Naccarelli awaiting her, but how changed! If pleasant things had passed between them, he was not thinking of them now; one doubted that they had actually occurred. Grave, gestureless, as though wrapped in a black cape, he inclined to her deeply. Margaret Johnson had trouble keeping herself from giggling. Wasn’t it all a comedy? If somebody would only laugh out loud with enough conviction, wouldn’t it all crumble? But she recalled Clara, her eye feasting on Fabrizio’s shoulder, her finger exploring the inspired juncture of his neck and
spine, and so she composed herself and allowed herself to be escorted from the hotel.

She saw at once that his object was to talk and that he had no destination—they walked along the river. The heat had been terrible for a week, but a breeze was blowing off the water now, and she wished she had brought her shawl.

“I saw today,” Signor Naccarelli began in measured tones, but when Mrs. Johnson suddenly sneezed, “Why did not you tell me?” he burst out, turning on her. “What can you be thinking of?”

Stricken silent, she walked on beside him. Somehow, then, he had found out. Certain dreary, familiar feelings returned to her. Meeting Noel at the airport, Clara behind in the car, wronged again, poor little victim of her own or her mother’s impulses. Well, if Signor Naccarelli was to be substituted for Noel, she thought with relief that anyway she could at last confess. Instead of Bermuda, they could go to the first boat sailing from Naples.

“It is too much,” went on Signor Naccarelli. “Two, three years, where there is love, where there is agreement, I say it is all right. But, no, it is too much. It is to make the fantastic.”

“Years?” she repeated.

“Can it be possible! But you must have understood! My son Fabrizio is twenty years old, no more. Whereas, your daughter, I see with my two eyes, written in the passport today in the office of the
parroco
—twenty-six! Six years difference! It cannot be. In that moment I ask myself, What must I say, what can I do? Soon it will be too late. What to do? I make the excuse, an appointment. I see often in the cinema this same excuse. It was not true. I have lied. I tell you frankly.”

“I had not thought of her being older,” said Mrs. Johnson. Weak with relief, she stopped walking. When she leaned her elbow against the parapet, she felt it trembling. “Believe me, Signor Naccarelli, they seemed so much the same age to me, it had not entered my mind that there was any difference.”

“It cannot be,” said Signor Naccarelli positively, scowling out toward the noble skyline of his native city. “I pass an afternoon of torment, an inferno. As I am a man, as I am a Florentine, as I am a father, as I long for my son’s happiness, as—” Words failed him.

“But surely the difference between them is not as great as that,” Mrs. Johnson reasoned. “In America we have seen many, many happy marriages with an even greater difference. Clara—she has been very carefully brought up. She had a long illness some years ago. To me she seemed even younger than Fabrizio.”

“A long illness.” He whirled on her scornfully. “How am I to know that she is cured of it?”

“You see her,” countered Mrs. Johnson. “She is as healthy as she seems.”

“It cannot be.” He turned away.

“Don’t you realize,” Mrs. Johnson pleaded, “that they are in love? Whatever their ages are, they are both young. This is a deep thing, a true thing. To try to stop what is between them now—”

“
Try
to stop? My dear lady, I will stop whatever I wish to stop.”

“Fabrizio—” she began.

“Yes, yes. He will try to kill himself. It is only to grow up. I, also, have sworn to take my life—can you believe? With passion I shake like this—and here I am today. No, no. To talk is one thing, to do another. Do not make illusions. He will not.”

“But Clara—” she began. Her voice faltered. She thought she would cry in spite of herself.

Signor Naccarelli scowled out toward the dark river. “It cannot be,” he repeated.

Mrs. Johnson looked at him and composure returned to her. Because whether this was comedy or tragedy, he had told her the truth. He could and would stop everything if he chose, and Fabrizio would not kill himself. If Mrs. Johnson had thought it practical, she would have murdered Signor Naccarelli. Instead she suggested that they cross over to a small bar. She was feeling that perhaps a brandy …

The bar was a tourist trap, placed near to American Express and crowded during the day. At night few people wandered in. Only one table was occupied at present. In the far corner, what looked to Mrs. Johnson exactly like a girl from Winston-Salem was conversing with an American boy who was growing a beard. Mrs. Johnson chose a table at equidistance between the pair and the waiter. She gave her order and waited, saying nothing till the small glass on the saucer was set before her. It was her last chance and she knew it. It helped her timing considerably to know how much she detested Signor Naccarelli.

“This is all too bad,” said Mrs. Johnson softly. “I received a letter from my husband today. Instead of five thousand dollars, he wants to make Clara and Fabrizio a present of fifteen thousand dollars.”

“That is nine million three hundred and seventy-five thousand lire,” said Signor Naccarelli. “So now you will write and explain everything, and that this wedding cannot be.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Johnson, and sipped her brandy.

Presently Signor Naccarelli ordered a cup of coffee.

Later on they might have been observed in various places, strolling about quiet, less frequented streets. Their talk ran on many things. Signor Naccarelli recalled her sneeze and wondered if she was cold. Mrs. Johnson was busily working out in the back of her mind how she was going to get fifteen thousand dollars without her husband, for the moment, knowing anything about it. It would take most of a family legacy, invested in her own name; and the solemn confidence of a lawyer, an old family friend; a long-distance request for him to trust her and cooperate; a promise that Noel would know everything anyway, within the month. Later, explaining to Noel, “In the U.S. you would undoubtedly have wanted to build a new house for your daughter and her husband. …” A good point.

“You must forgive me,” said Signor Naccarelli, “if I ask a most personal thing of you. The Signorina Clara, she would like to have children, would she not? My wife can think of nothing else.”

“Oh, Clara longs for children!” said Mrs. Johnson.

Toward midnight they stopped in a bar for a final brandy. Signor Naccarelli insisted on paying, as always.

When she returned to her room, Margaret Johnson sat on her bed for a while. Then she stood at the window for a while and looked down on the river. With one finger, she touched her mouth where there lingered an Italian kiss.

How had she maneuvered herself out of further, more prolonged and more intimately staged embraces without giving the least impression that she hadn’t enjoyed the one he had surprised her with? In the shadow of a handsome façade, before the stout, lion-mouth crested arch where he had beckoned her to stop—“Something here will interest you, perhaps”—how, oh, how, had she managed to manage it well? Out of practice in having to for, she shuddered to think, how many years. Nor could anything erase, remove from her the estimable flash of his eye, so near her own, so near.

“Mother!”

Why, I had forgotten
her
, thought Mrs. Johnson.

“Yes, darling, I’m coming!” In Clara’s room she switched on a dim Italian lamp. “There, now, it’s all going to be all right. We’re going to meet them tomorrow, just as we did today. But tomorrow it will be all right. Go to sleep now. You’ll see.”

It’s true, she thought, smoothing Clara’s covers, switching out the light. No doubt of it now. And to keep down the taste of success, she bit hard on her lip (so lately kissed). If he let me out so easily, it means he doesn’t want to risk anything. It means he wants this wedding. He wants it, too.

13

In that afternoon’s gentle decline, Fabrizio had found himself restless and irritable. Earlier he had deliberately ignored his promise to meet Giuseppe, who was doubtless burning to find out why the luncheon
had not come off. That day he traveled unfamiliar paths, did not return home for lunch and spent the siesta hours sulking about the Boboli Gardens, where an unattractive American lady with a guide-book flattered herself that he was pursuing her. Every emotion seemed stronger than usual. If anyone he knew should see him here! He all but dashed out at the thought, entered narrow streets and, in a poor quarter, gnawed a workingman’s sandwich—a hard loaf with a paper-thin slice of salami. When the black cloud blew up he waited in the door of a church he had never seen before.

About six he entered his own little shop, where he had been seldom seen of late and then always full of jokes and laughter. Now he asked for the books and, finding that some handkerchief boxes had got among the gloves, imagined that everything was in disorder and that the cousin was busy ruining his business and robbing him. The cousin, who had been robbing him, but only mildly—they both understood almost to the lira exactly how much—insisted that Fabrizio should pay him his wages at once and he would leave and never return voluntarily as long as he lived. They both became bored with the argument.

Fabrizio thought of Clara. When he thought of her thighs and breasts he sighed; weakness swept him; he grew almost ill. So he thought of her face instead. Gentle, beautiful, it rose before him. He saw it everywhere, that face. No lonely villa on a country hillside, yellow in the sun, oleanders on the terrace, but might have inside a chapel, closed off, unused for years, on the wall a fresco, work of some ancient name known in all the world, a lost work—Clara. He loved her. She looked up at him now out of the glass-enclosed counter for merchandise, but the face was only his, framed in socks.

At evening, at dark, he went the opposite way from home, down the Arno, walking sometimes along the streets, descending wherever he could to walk along the bank itself. He saw the sun set along the flow, and stopping in the dark at last he said aloud, “I could walk to Pisa.” At another direction into the dark, he said, “Or Vallombrosa.” Then he turned, ascended the bank to the road and walked back
home. Possessed by an even deeper mood, the strangest he had ever known, he wandered about the city, listening to the echo of his own steps in familiar streets and looking at towering shapes of stone. The night seemed to be moving along secretly, but fast; the earth, bearing all burdens lightly, spinning, and racing ahead—just as a Florentine had said, so it did. The silent towers tilted toward the dawn.

He saw his father the next morning. “It is all right,” said Signor Naccarelli. “I have talked a long time with the signora. We will go today as yesterday to the office of the
parroco.”

“But Papà!” Fabrizio spread all ten fingers wide and shook his hands violently before him. “You had me sick with worry. My heart almost stopped. Yesterday I was like a crazy person. I have never spent such a day.”

“Yes, well. I am sorry. The signorina is a bit older than I thought. Not much, but—Did you know?”

“Of course I knew. I told you so. Long ago. Did you forget it?”

“Perhaps I did. Never mind. And you, my son. You are twentyone years,
vero?”